The cpio trailer problem (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://entropymine.wordpress.com/2018/05/27/the-cpio-trailer-problem/ <comment><USER2> That "TRAILER!!!" string should be added to the _Big List of Naughty Strings_ ¹ (discussed here previously²).

1\. [https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty- strings](https://github.com/minimaxir/big-list-of-naughty-strings)

2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13406119](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13406119)

</comment><comment><USER3> The Linux kernel will keep going after the "TRAILER!!!" entry in the initramfs. This is useful in the context of initramfs because you can concatenate them together - a trivial way to add more files to the init ramdisk or even overwrite existing ones. You can even concat gz-compressed cpio initramfs files which causes a similar problem finding the uncompressed size because the last 4 bytes will only show the size of the last gzip section (try with gzip -l).

</comment><comment><USER4> > I assume that cpio is very rarely used these days.

From Wikipedia:

> The use of cpio by the RPM Package Manager, in the initramfs program of > Linux kernel 2.6, and in Apple's Installer (pax) make cpio an important > archiving tool.

<comment><USER3> RPM hasn't used true cpio for a while [since 2013] because cpio didn't support > 4GB files. It now uses its own format which it evolved from cpio.

<comment><USER5> Seems they still use the same logic though: [https://github.com/rpm-software- management/rpm/blob/853c48ba...](https://github.com/rpm-software- management/rpm/blob/853c48ba6468ce1a516621a2fa6d1fc51e4f7410/lib/cpio.c#L49)

<comment><USER3> That doesn't actually matter though does it, because RPM is no longer using cpio, it's now using a custom format that happens to once have been related to cpio. What matters is what RPM does, not what cpio does.

In this case it's not possible to create such an archive using rpmbuild as all files added to RPMs much start with "/". I just tried it and got:

      RPM build errors:
          File must begin with "/": TRAILER!!!

You cannot hack on your own rpmbuild because you wouldn't be able to make a signed RPM (as those can only be built through the Koji build system which doesn't have your hacked rpmbuild), so you couldn't distribute that RPM to Fedora or Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In other words this is essentially a non-problem for RPM.

<comment><USER5> The comparison is just to the filename, not including the path. You may be right, but that check doesn't prove it.

Edit: Thanks for the reply! Apparently they are including the path.

<comment><USER3> I can create an RPM containing a filename "TRAILER!!!" just fine:

      $ rpm -qlp /home/rjones/d/fedora/virt-what/master/x86_64/virt-what-1.20-1.fc33.x86_64.rpm
      /TRAILER!!!
      /usr/lib/.build-id
      /usr/lib/.build-id/59
      /usr/lib/.build-id/59/59c1cb95689b7babd5a6cb1b5bc58f12e20b3a
      /usr/libexec/virt-what-cpuid-helper
      /usr/sbin/virt-what
      /usr/share/doc/virt-what
      /usr/share/doc/virt-what/COPYING
      /usr/share/doc/virt-what/README
      /usr/share/man/man1/virt-what.1.gz

Furthermore I installed and uninstalled it with no ill effects, and the file was created and removed in /. So whatever problem cpio may have with this file does not affect the RPM-not-quite-cpio format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I never really understood why tar "won" and cpio "lost" the archive wars. Both do pretty much the same thing, thus I think it was just a matter of personal preference?

I started using *NIX around ~2006 and nobody was using cpio already then, I only had the chance of learning of its existence when I first had to extract an RPM.

<comment><USER7> Because the cpio utility has awful usability

(it might capture more info than tar maybe? but it's not worth the effort)

<comment><USER8> Second that. I had the time when I was working with initrd images, so I had to use cpio a lot. I could never get used to its syntax.

And the fact that it's manpage was missing, only saying "use info instead" did not help its usability at all.

<comment><USER9> That was a GNU documentation problem, never applicable to non-GNU versions of cpio, and not even applicable to the current GNU manual page, which has no mention of info and definitely exists. It also post-dates by years the period where tar and cpio were in competition, which was (roughly) the early 1980s. (The POSIX standard pax aimed at resolving the conflict was in the 1003.1b draft in 1991.) It thus is an entirely fallacious explanation for what happened in the "archiver wars".

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18978064)

* [https://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?cpio](https://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?cpio)

* [http://osr507doc.sco.com/man/html.C/cpio.C.html](http://osr507doc.sco.com/man/html.C/cpio.C.html)

* [https://manpages.debian.org/sid/cpio/cpio.1.en.html](https://manpages.debian.org/sid/cpio/cpio.1.en.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting. I wonder why they didn't just use a value that's not valid for a filename. TRAILER/// might have worked for Unix.

</comment><comment><USER10> TL;DR a lot of formats have "sentinel" values that are little more than "nobody sane would ever pick this value" and we end up in a conundrum when the obvious ambiguities arise.

<comment><USER7> It's not an issue with sentinel values, but an issue with not escaping your inputs

I don't believe tar "falls for" such a stupid trick.

Confusing metadata with actual data is a classic security blunder

tl;dr: cpio has amateurish levels of input validation/handling

<comment><USER11> > tl;dr: cpio is an amateur project

TBF cpio dates back to v7 unix, some time before considerations of security really became a thing.

<comment><USER7> The question is not so much why it was like that, the question is why nobody fixed this yet

I like the Unix environment, but I can understand why stuff like systemd take hold, because the legacy is painful.

And any Unix environment has this weird mix of tools where the most popular ones got better over time (tar, etc) then you have the weird ones that didn't evolve so much like cpio

<comment><USER12> A bit of shameless self-promotion, I wrote a blog post some time ago which goes through the history of tar[1]. Tar definitely has evolved through the Unix wars, but I wouldn't say the final result is really that great. While we do tend to reinvent tools for reinvention's sake, I do think tar really does deserve a redesign based on modern constraints (rather than the constraints of tape archives). Zip archives are markedly better designed.

Also, cpio did evolve at least somewhat. In fact POSIX has a separate archive tool called "pax" (which supports both tar and cpio) which was meant to act as a truce between the tar and cpio factions of Unix vendors. Nobody uses it, as far as I know.

[1]: [https://www.cyphar.com/blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i- tar](https://www.cyphar.com/blog/post/20190121-ociv2-images-i-tar)

<comment><USER11> > Zip archives are markedly better designed.

Yes and no. They have advantages and drawbacks:

* zip archives don't require seeking through the entire thing to list archive contents

* zip archives can random-access files cheaply

* zip checksums the files themselves (AFAIK tar only checksums the header)

* zip compresses files individually, meaning different files can use different configuration

* the central directory (CD) means you can trade efficiency for very cheap updates: removing a file is just rewriting the CD without that file, likewise to replace a file just tack the new file at the end, then write a new CD with updated offsets

However

* "streaming" zips can lead to schizophrenia as the central directory record does not necessarily match the streamed contents or ordering

* zip _only_ compresses files individually meaning there's no cross-file efficiency to be had (some compression formats have a "solid" archive concept which compresses globally as an opt-in) so tar _can_ compressed better depending on the mix and the compression algorithm (assuming both archives use the same method)

> Also, cpio did evolve at least somewhat. In fact POSIX has a separate > archive tool called "pax" (which supports both tar and cpio) which was meant > to act as a truce between the tar and cpio factions of Unix vendors. Nobody > uses it, as far as I know.

GNU CPIO apparently straights support tar.

<comment><USER12> I would argue the upsides out-weigh the downsides. Out of two downsides you mention, one actually applies to tar archives as well (the ordering of files can be random) -- it's just that there's no index to compare against. If you added an index to a tar archive it would have the same issue.

The compression point you make is fair, though there is a clear trade-off when it comes to random-access. Naive whole-archive compression makes efficient random-accesses impossible because you have to decompress everything before the data you're trying to access. A sufficiently-clever archive and compression format may be able to overcome that, but I'd argue that zip made a reasonable trade-off here.

> AFAIK tar only checksums the header

tar doesn't checksum anything, there isn't even a CRC.

<comment><USER11> > I would argue the upsides out-weigh the downsides.

I could agree, but that doesn't mean replacing tars by zips doesn't have drawbacks. Even more so as you can use whatever compression scheme you want with tars, not so with zips (unless you use them as tars and then… they're just a worse tar).

> Out of two downsides you mention, one actually applies to tar archives as > well (the ordering of files can be random) -- it's just that there's no > index to compare against.

There is no schyzophrenia because tars _always_ behave that way.

> If you added an index to a tar archive it would have the same issue.

Yes, if tar were a completely different format it would have different issues. It's not though.

> Naive whole-archive compression makes efficient random-accesses impossible > because you have to decompress everything before the data you're trying to > access. A sufficiently-clever archive and compression format may be able to > overcome that, but I'd argue that zip made a reasonable trade-off here.

So did tar, they're just _different_ tradeoffs. For instance archiving tons of small files with zip is an absolutely miserable experience because you've got more overhead than you have content for instance. Because tar was designed for _tape archive_ , its use-cases included backups which, for university computer, would be likely to include lots of small files.

> tar doesn't checksum anything, there isn't even a CRC.

It's not a CRC, but tar has a very simple checksum on headers: the 257 bytes of the header are summed into an integer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there a name for this general class of problems? Where you have an accidental parsing/scoping error because the encoding format is ambiguous, or doesn't take into account a specific configuration of the message contents?

<comment><USER14> I would classify this as using an in-band signal rather than an out of band signal. Twitter used to have this same problems ages ago. I don't remember the details but it was something like DMs being standard twitter messages with "/dm" at the beginning.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Ace of spades, jack of all trades or something else? - <AUTHOR>

Title explanation: I know we, as developers, are a very heterogeneous group of people and, as it, we adopt different strategies to be successful in our profession.
So, which is your personal strategy about improving your knowledge and skillset?
Are you an ace of spades, like a guru on a single platform/os/language and stick to it? A Jack of all trades, open minded and trying to learn all possible (and mainly useful for your situation, place, job, etc) languages but not mastering any of it? Or just something in the middle like a person with a very strong knowledge in one field and an handful of other skills?
Why did you choose that strategy and which is your current skillset? <comment><USER2> My personal strategy has been that of becoming T-shaped, a term I learned from Valve's employee handbook[0]:

        People who are both generalists (highly skilled at a
        broad set of valuable things - the top of the T) and
        also experts (among the best in their field within a
        narrow discipline - the vertical leg of the T).

I think you need have a broad understanding of many tools, languages, and fields, but you should also aim for expertise in one field.

[0]: [http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...](http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> T-shaped is the way to go. Go wide in a broad swath of disciplines and skills, especially with the ability to combine them and collaborate in them (i.e understanding design and sales as well as technology, and being able to work well with designers, marketing people as well as with other programmers), go deep and narrow in one or two subfields in which you are a specialist.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-shaped_skills)

My favourite people to work with are all T-shaped in one way or another. I learnt programming on the job after having worked in media and the art world, and having (not very successfully, but to great personal learning) ran a small company, so I'd like to think I'm versatile that way.

<comment><USER4> Very interesting... I think I just found a great way to describe myself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found it valuable to specialize in a subset of machine learning. From there, I tend to specialize in the JVM ecosystem while having a decent background in node/frontend and python. The hybrid skillset has been amazing for a swath of application areas.

Long story short: T shaped as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> \- Im more of something in between. Like as of now im jack of all trades, but I will like to be an ace,of spades in all platforms.</comment>


Find a cool domain name - <AUTHOR>

So I run a blog where I've been listing desirable domain names. I have a pretty large database that contains an a large list of domain names that are coming available and I use various strategies to widdle them down to those that I think are somewhat interesting.. For example, if I search for the domains coming available with the word 'linux' in them, I get -  http://i.imgur.com/zan3T.jpg<p>Does anyone think this tool is worth making publicly available? How would you advertise it? So far I've put together the blog at webengers.com but I don't think that's a very good strategy. <comment><USER2> I would think this would just make it easier for domain squatters, giving them a central place to trawl. Although, they probably already use tools like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> thats pretty awesome, i think its really handy. seems to me when i look around for domain names i have to blindly guess and check to see if theyre available. a cleanly built tool like this would save a lot of time IMO (but my experience is limited)</comment>


Tech majors to join hands against patent suits - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINBNG11177720080630 <comment><USER2> There ought to be a little-guy version. Like this:

Anyone can signup for nominal fee ($100), every member donates all their patents to the pool and gets rights to the pool. Once you have rights to the pool you can force a cross-licensing agreement with any other real company (won't work with patent trolls though). Those who don't want to donate their stuff can pay really big money to get stuff from it, which will go towards maintaining the organization.

This may not work well on small scale, but if it were to reach large scale it will become very attractive to join and will put an end to the patent system, for good.

<comment><USER3> Patents vary hugely in value. The vast majority turn out to be worth almost nothing, while a few are worth billions. I'm pretty sure if you had this it would just accumulate all the worthless patents, while people and companies who owned the valuable ones would have no interest in joining.

<comment><USER4> Actually, that doesn't matter very much. The point of the pool is not to get access to patented technology that you wouldn't otherwise be able to use. It's to be able to defend yourself against patent lawsuits. If you're sued, you can counter sue for infringing some stupid worthless patent in the pool, because any real implementation of anything infringes on _some_ patent. With enough patents in the pool, counter-suit becomes a viable defense. Not also that this is why it won't work against patent trolls - they don't actually do anything of substance, and therefore aren't vulnerable to counter-suit.

<comment><USER2> Right, and as big dogs lose profit in patent system, they will lobby to can the whole thing completely. Thus patent trolls will also lose in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow. I smell opportunity here! The patent system is broken enough now that you can basically patent the same vague "method" over and over again.

Now you can sell each one too Google. Profit!

Yes. The above was sarcasm. I'm a little disappointed by this. This would seem to just encourage the production of more bogus patents. If they were really serious, they'd put all of those millions into patent reforms. If you look at the list of participants, many have not been model citizens when it comes to patents. This smells more like another power-play than any attempt at reform, or even "defense" as they claim.

</comment><comment><USER6> Suppose that someone invents a better way to rank search results.

What are the acceptable ways for such a person to make money from that invention? (Most of the respondents to this message seem to believe that patenting such a method or licensing such a patent is unacceptable. If you think that licensing is acceptable but lawsuits aren't, please explain why anyone would license if patent holders couldn't sue.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Disgusting. Imagine how much better off we'd be if there wasn't a need to spend that kind of money to preemptively ward off lawsuits from patent leeches. If the big boys are this worried about the current patent situation, how many smaller companies never even get off the ground due to it?

Is the possibility of a patent lawsuit a factor in the decision of which startups to extend YC offers to?

</comment><comment><USER4> What we need is a Godel patent: a patent on the business method of patent- trolling. That would help in two ways. First you could go after all the trolls with patent-infringement lawsuits. Second, it would serve as an easy-to- understand example of how screwed-up the system is in the first place, and stimulate the discussion needed to introduce real reform.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sounds like a cartel doesn't it? And, what's to stop this alliance from using patents to stifle innovation?

</comment><comment><USER9> "are believed to have a joined a group calling itself the Allied Security Trust"

Awesome! This sounds like it would make a great FPS :-)</comment>


Ask HN: Is there an almost good way to pre-validate an idea myself? - <AUTHOR> I am interested to find out ways/heuristics/questions on how to pre-validate my own ideas before going with them to talk with possible customers or partners.
In general I have a lot of ideas and I am looking for a way to decide which one is the one who I should invest time to validate it with potential customers.
I found some good questions to ask about my idea in term of market size, is it a need or a possibility, what kind of customers will there be ... But I am looking for more ideas or better questions that can guide me and make this process less subjective.
I am curious if someone recommends a way to do this in a way that is as efficient as possible. Probably I am looking to some kind of skeptical analysis combined with data. <comment><USER2> You can't really "validate" an idea prior to launching something.

You can however view market size, here are the two ways I would do it:

1\. Check out Facebook ad's and find your target person, Facebook will estimate how many people are in that target group.

2\. Check out subreddits in the various areas you are looking to build a product for.

That being said, look at PROBLEMs, and try not to form ideas. Fixing a problem is much easier and will get people excited, building a product isn't really about your ideas - it's about everyone else.

Subjectively, here are two examples.

1\. I built a solution to a problem a friend was having. They couldn't get in to see a course advisor when registering for classes, so I wrote one for them: [https://easy-a.net/](https://easy-a.net/) It became super popular, without me realizing it. I started getting "thank you's" in the middle of class, and I was like "for what?" That's how powerful fixing a problem is.

2\. The other example, is a problem I wanted to fix for myself. I wanted to make money so I built my own financial advisor (for stocks, bitcoins, etc.). We recently launched it, and it's only had a hundred or so email registrations: [https://projectpiglet.com/](https://projectpiglet.com/)

The difference being, I'm only building my idea for myself.

When building for other people, you have to put yourself in their shoes. That forces you to relay information better, fix their problems, and make them happy. That's how you validate.

I recommend tossing up a signup page, unattached to your name, with a brief description of what you want to do. Just see how many people sign up! I recognize that's talking with potential customers, but a signup page takes a day, and actually forces you to address issues.

I actually love using forms, and posting on subreddits asking for people to list their problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> The main reason behind my question was that I have a form of Ideas Journal where I write either problems I see or possibilities of what can be created.

From time to time I read it and try to figure out if there is something truly valuable to pursue.

For sure setting up a signup page could be one way of doing that. And now that I re-read your comment I am thinking that I could make a script to automatically generate these kind of pages for my ideas.

This might be a good way to automatically test most of them.

I also take great inspiration from your examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This might not be a useful answer for you, but are you sure any of that is necessary? You can spend months pre-validating an idea and never get anywhere.

Go talk to potential customers now. Find people who are willing to pay for what your are going to build. Once you know they exist, then you can start worrying about market size and the rest. At this point having real life people who want to pay you is infinitely more valuable than any hypothetical data and analysis.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I totally agree that the best investment of my time would be to talk with customers.

But maybe I am doing the process wrong. I read a lot about how to start by choosing a group and discovering their ideas.

Currently I have some kind of Idea Journal (actually a .md file in a cloud) where I write ideas, needs, problems, possibilities. It might not be the best way to do this.

I was looking for an easy way (from sitting on my desk) to filter them. Initially I get enthusiastic about all of them remembering the context where I wrote them and I think I am a type of person optimistic so I catch myself finding a lot of reasons why most of them are good.

So I read some books about startups, ideas, lean, ... and I got some questions to ask myself about them. This made the filtering process better.

The reason I asked this question was that I wanted to know also more practical examples of what do you - HN - do before taking the first actions (first investments of your time) in the project you want to build.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are two great books that helped me do this.

First, the Mom Test, it is very short, and it talks about what types of questions to ask and what types to avoid. The main focus is avoiding the introduction of bias. You want good data you can work with.

Second book is Running Lean. It has a great script that you can adapt to the industry you are targeting. It also gives pointers on conducting the interview.

Together, these two short books will get you started.

<comment><AUTHOR> Didn't read them yet. Thank you for suggestions. Can you please confirm that the second book is this one "Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works" \- by Ash Maurya?

<comment><USER4> yes, that is the book by Ash Maurya.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does your Target Buyer attend any conferences/trade shows/meet-ups? If you can get to any of those -- the face-to-face interaction is invaluable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think most of them are attending conferences/meetups.

Like I wrote above, currently I started with ideas and trying to see (from my desk) if there is a value in them before investing time.

Maybe it is not the right process and I should pick one idea and directly go and talk with customers. Probably I believe (or I am attached) too much on the things I wrote in my idea journal and I should find a way to look at them from different perspectives.

<comment><USER5> From your desk-- assuming you can identify attendees of the appropriate conferences/meetups (Twitter is good for this)... cold email/call call them is the next best thing. Ultimately however, you have to get out of your room.</comment></comment></comment>


How Facebook determines the list of 10 Friends to display on your profile? - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/111297306144520956414/posts/FJRYJaDMWbb

<comment><USER2> <https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=116320945119338>

"The selection includes many friends who you publicly interact with the most. Examples of public interactions include Wall posts, comments and mutually attended events. Facebook will never show friends based on whose profiles you choose to view or who you interact with over messages and chat."

<comment><USER3> There are people consistently on my list whom I never interact with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting experiment. I had been wondering about this. I have also been thinking along the same lines as Florian about 'Find Friends'. I have certainly had some people appear there who I am aware of (e.g. neighbors) but we don't have any friends in common and they aren't in any of my email accounts.

<comment><USER5> I've noticed that the friend suggestions seem to be related to whose profile I had been viewing during the current Facebook session.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is wrong. My friend who passed away a month or so ago is constantly on my list.

<comment><USER7> _My friend who passed away a month or so ago is constantly on my list._

BTW, what does FB do about such accounts?

<comment><USER6> So far they haven't touched hers, and I would be pretty pissed if they did. I need to find a way to download as much stuff off of there as possible in case they do decide to remove it.

<comment><USER8> This might help: <http://code.google.com/p/photograbber/>

<comment><USER6> Thank you. I wish this was available for Linux, but I'll be able to use someone else's computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> His tests don't seem to distinguish between H2 (recent visits by the friend) and H4 (recent interactions) very effectively. I could see H4 being a legitimate strategy but H2 is a bit more concerning.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I think it's a mix of those two things - my list is composed of: a) people I interacted a lot recently b) people I interacted a lot in the past (and then almost not at all for a long time) c) people I haven't really interacted at all

"c" must come from H2, "a" from H4 and that leaves "b" as either flaw in H4 or also a H2 - the latter would be a good news for me because people from that category are actually girls I gave up on a long time ago thinking they are not interested in me ;)

<comment><USER11> '..."c" must come from H2, "a" from H4 and that leaves "b" as either flaw in H4 or also a H2..."

^^ false dilemma, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Given that apps are banned from allowing people to know who visited their profile pages and facebook purposely doesn't have this functionality, it's interested that they use an algorithm that makes it possible for users to guess who has been visiting their profile page.

<comment><USER13> I don't think that it does. The algorithm makes it possible for users to see who they publicly interact with the most, but this information could be gleaned by viewing that person's wall postings or photo comments. Therefore, the algorithm is just showing you people that visit your profile and interact, which you could figure out pretty easily anyways, not people who visit without leaving a mark.

<comment><USER12> >> Ahhh and in bonus: you know the "People you may know" section displayed at the right of your profile. Guess what? This section should be renamed "People who are not your friends but who attempted to visit your profile recently" ;)

This exert from the post would suggest otherwise, don't you think?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting hypothesis.</comment>


AT&T will put a fake 5G logo on its 4G LTE phones - <AUTHOR> https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/at-t-to-begin-upgrading-existing-lte-phones-to-5g-e <comment><USER2> They've done this kind of ploy forever.

They also require that the strength bars display the highest reception of _any_ type of service it can receive, regardless if that is what it is using right now.

So it may display 4 bars and LTE but it's really 4 bars for GSM service, despite using LTE atm.

They do this because it works when it comes to reviews and perception.

There was a phone that people complained about reception on that was displaying the current service signal strength using a realistic algorithm.

Review sites, etc, complained about it compared to other phones despite it being better in actuality.

A "fix" was issued. That fix was to use the same signal bar algorithm as everyone else. The same review sites/etc were awash with how much better everyone's reception was and gladness the bug had been fixed.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, pretty much all of the carriers cheat, and demand the ability to cheat, e.g.: [https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/dad385ae29e13a04500fd698e585f933cd352e53)

<comment><USER4> What the fuck Android? Why are you helping mobile carriers lie to their customers?

<comment><USER5> Signal bars are meaningless anyway. Even a raw dB measurement wouldn't tell much about the service quality, so they might as well switch to a "coverage / no coverage" indicator.

<comment><USER6> To go a step further for GSM (I don't know precisely for 4G, but I suspect it is the same) the base station determines both handset dB/SNR/Quality and commands the handset power which usually is limiting performance. It is likely this setting that allows the handset to report its "number of bars"...

So if you don't let them lie on the handset... it's likely that the network providers would just start lying to the handsets at an even deeper level than they already do. Just get the marketing silliness out of the way at as high a level as possible so engineers can make our coverage better.

<comment><USER7> there are at least 4 values.

rsrp, rsrq, sinr, rssi

rsrq is probably the important one. You can clearly see usage of the cell tower with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seeing a lot of comments here that are along the lines of, "this is typical marketing aka lying." Just wanted to say (as a marketing major and former marketing guy) these are most assuredly _not_ the same thing, and I think we make a grave error by normalizing the idea that lying == marketing. Lying is not ok. Marketing is perfectly ok. Let's be careful lest we make excuses like, "Oh they're just marketing"

<comment><USER9> Marketing is not perfectly ok, at best it alerts us to things we weren't going to buy because we didn't know about them. But most of the time it either 1) encourages us to buy things we weren't already going to buy (like the $20 shit they sell on tv) or 2) attempts to win mindshare/sales over some other competing brand, which is also wasteful because it's ultimately just a product trying to carve itself a larger piece of a relatively fixed-size pie. Or it does some other nefarious stuff like trying to boost PR of some business or sway our political opinion. And many of the methods that marketing uses to accomplish these goals leverage negative human psychology like making us feel ugly/fat/poor/stupid if we don't make that purchase we weren't going to make originally.

Open a magazine/watch tv/disable adblock/look at roadside ads and you'll see that very rarely are ads actually making the world a better place.

<comment><USER10> I don't agree with your statements that (almost?) all marketing is bad because it tries to promote products. I believe a company has the right to try to get people interested in their product, because if not, how would people get to know about it? Hearing other people talk about it? Those other people should've known about it in the first place (how?) and this is promotion as well. The idea of product promotion at its core is not bad, it's inherent to how our economy works.

> And many of the methods that marketing uses to accomplish these goals > leverage negative human psychology like making us feel ugly/fat/poor/stupid > if we don't make that purchase we weren't going to make originally.

_This_ is where I agree with you, however. Promotion is one thing, and making the world a better place with every single thing you do is hardly possible (or necessary), but making the world a decidedly worse place is not what we're looking for. The shaming tactic that you describe is something that works in marketing, and it may not even be lying, but it's bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like that every single brand of toilet paper now boasts "8=16" or "12=32" etc.

It's a strange comfortable flexibility we have developed around truth.

It's almost as if "freedom of speech" means you can massage the truth if it increase sales but god forbid you make a drawing of 90 year old cartoon mouse.

<comment><USER12> > I like that every single brand of toilet paper now boasts "8=16" or "12=32" > etc.

The left is number of rolls in the package, the right is the number of the same brand "standard" rolls it is equivalent to by length (there is accommodating text which makes this explicit); this facilitates price comparisons among packages with different roll sizes.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, it's basically the same as having both serving size and net weight. Far from a problem.

<comment><USER11> Ah, and it happens that no one makes any "standard" rolls.

And what about Pam Spray On pure olive oil labeled fat-free? Serving size small enough for the fat to round to zero but not the olive oil content?

<comment><USER12> > Ah, and it happens that no one makes any "standard" rolls.

Yes they do, e.g Charmin Regular rolls (which is important, because some dispensers won't handle bigger rolls), but in any case the utility for comparisons doesn't depend on regular rolls being an option, just as volume in liters of a drink product is useful even if 1.0l isn't one of the package sizes.

<comment><USER11> Which would mean they are comparing to a standard they made up. Which is the gist of my point.

Going further down the rabbit hole I find:

Charmin rolls labeled "4=16" have 308 sheets. "Regular Rolls" were, when they were available, 121 sheets.

Other implied "standards" within Charmin vary from sku to sku. So apparently the Charmin Standard does not exist in their product line and is not a fixed value either.

They could just to put the total inches^2 on the package of course.

<comment><USER14> Elsewhere in the thread is people talking about how a business tried to do away with "on sale" shenanigans, just listed reasonable prices, and got fucked horribly.

When it comes to anything marketing/sale you have to assume the answer to weird messages like that is "because thats what the consumer wants to see". They want everything they buy to be on sale. They want their toilet paper measured in make believe units. They want me to say "yes we have an option to record that credential, it's just not turned on for this demo" rather than "yeah we can rename the heading of that textbox during implementation" during a software demo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of a Subaru Forester I owned. It had a badge 'pzev' which apparently meant 'partial zero-emissions vehicle'. Which meant what? not zero emissions certainly. It was a regular gas car.

<comment><USER16> Yeah I have a Subaru too and I've always thought that was silly. In their defense though, it's not just something they made up for marketing.

Rather, it's a term for a silly thing California allows automakers to do to get around the requirement of selling actual zero-emissions vehicles: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_zero- emissions_vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_zero- emissions_vehicle)

<comment><USER17> It's a bit of a silly term but what it describes seems like a sensible thing. It's meaningless if you're only worried about CO2 but it's significant when considering pollution that affects air quality.

<comment><USER16> Right, I guess I'm just way more worried about CO2 than about smog.

<comment><USER18> Why? Even the EU is moving away from emphasizing CO2 over particulate emissions.

<comment><USER16> Because if we don't dramatically cut our CO2 emissions quickly we're irreversibly fucked? And part of that means moving away from ICE vehicles carrying a single person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You know how your 65" tv is actually 64.5 inches?

That's called rounding.

Now, imagine your TV was advertised as 4Ke when it was actually 1080p.

That's called false advertising.

<comment><USER20> > Now, imagine your TV was advertised as 4Ke when it was actually 1080p.

This happens with projectors. Many projectors are advertised as "4K" when in fact they only _accept_ a 4K signal, but still project a 1080p picture.

Some of them have a kind of hacky trick which involves vibrating the image chip, so that it can project a second set of pixels offset from the first by half a pixel, which gets you a ~2K picture - kinda sorta.

<comment><USER21> 1080p _is_ 2K. The "K" measurements are horizontal, not vertical like 1080p.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> AT&T also did that with the 4G rollout – my iPhone 4S, which lacked 4G hardware, would display 4G in the status bar, which was especially cruel since they had a huge capacity problem and the average speeds were in the double- digit Kbps range.

<comment><USER23> I remember that. HSPA+, which was just fast 3G. It was an improvement from what I remember, but the first time I tasted LTE, I felt ripped off.

<comment><USER22> Yes - definitely more bandwidth, although IIRC the hardware on my 4S didn't get full advantage, but the latency and time to reestablish a session were so much worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Keith's blog post on this is great : [http://blog.keithw.org/2013/07/3g-and- me.html](http://blog.keithw.org/2013/07/3g-and-me.html)

Carriers are uncomfortable about publishing the actual throughput and latency characteristics of their Internet access but are perfectly happy to slap a new "g" on their boxes for marketing purposes.

</comment><comment><USER25> Tangential: I find networking (both wifi and cellular) to be one of the most problematic parts in a smartphone. These are quite literally the things that make a smartphone. This may be OS and device specific, but with AOSP on a pixel, these are my common issues: 1) Frequent wifi disconnects 2) Phone shows connected to both wifi and cellular but internet doesn't work 3) Cellular data is supposed to be always on but doesn't work as intended 4) Wifi-Calling drops call if wifi disconnects (which is probably a combination of 1 and 3). 4) Phone prefers shitty wifi (for eg. while driving by near an AP) over cellular. Does everyone have some variation of these problems ? Have iphones solved these for good ?

<comment><USER26> this do not sell. A while ago phones where purchased on internal memory size (and a fixed $100 upgrade steps for some reason). Until recently purchase decision was based on screen size, bigger the better. Now they are decided on a notch on the screen apparently.

Absolutely nobody buying phones care about the items you listed, unfortunately.

<comment><USER27> They absolutely do, it's just impossible to quantify. When the WiFi hardware is garbage on a phone non-technical people just call it "slow/buggy/glitchy" without really being able to identify why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I worked for a telco who advertised their service as "3G" because theoretically, under ideal conditions, it could hit a speed that was somehow close to what we all think of as "3G".

Marketing felt perfectly fine about it, even though it was a blatant lie. They ignored Engineering. I think it's just how the world is now.

</comment><comment><USER29> Remember... we still never got 4G. Speed requirements were set and nobody ever met them, so they just called it 4G-LTE.

Nobody should be shocked that this is happening again for 5G and calling 5G-E.

<comment><USER30> AT&T did the same with HSPA+ (calling it 4G). Just so they could be one of the first to have 4G out the door. At least from a lying, ahem, marketing perspective.

<comment><USER21> I think the timeline was Sprint first launched WiMAX and called it "4G" (even though it was never any faster than HSDPA) and then T-Mobile and AT&T couldn't look worse with a similarly-specced network so they jumped on the bandwagon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I don't understand how these companies can get away with so much. I had to find a plan a month ago, and none of these companies display their prices on their websites. They force you to go to a shop, where people don't want to show you the prices and the different plans either. You're met with aggressive sales people and you end up paying for something that you have no idea if it's fair or not.

</comment><comment><USER32> I really don't think the first amendment should apply to corporate communications that are designed to deceive consumers.

<comment><USER33> > I really don't think the first amendment should apply to speech that > deceives consumers.

FTFY. It's not about corporations being evil, per se. Free speech should not be a defense against false advertising, any more than it's a defense against shouting fire in a movie theatre or threatening bodily harm.

<comment><USER32> Agreed but I picked corporations as a practical threshold for commercial exaggeration vs trying to police people at flea markets or the like, and also because the whole purpose of incorporation is to shed liability (in most cases) and that the fiscal immunity should come at a price of some freedom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Does a technical definition of 5G even exist? Going from 3 to 4G was mostly about the transition from CDMA to ODFMA with other perks tacked on. This is why even though the marketing department at AT&T called HSPA+ "4G" the engineers knew it really wasn't.

What is the equivalent step change for 5G that is as significant as OFDMA, or is 5G is purely a collection of incremental improvements?

</comment><comment><USER35> I remember something similar happening back in the days with totally unrelated tech:

\- MP3: Can play audio. Marketing and tech play nice together.

\- MP4: Can play video. Marketing and tech play nice together

\- MP5: Wait what? Marketing needs "next" iterarion, it doesn't make any sense. It's just MP4 with some random silly feature (depending on the company).

<comment><USER36> MP5: is literally a gun :D

<comment><USER35> Oh this happened back in Spain when I was a teenager, so I had no idea lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Url changed from [https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/21/18151764/att-5g-evolutio...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/21/18151764/att-5g-evolution- logo-rollout-fake-network), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER38> Telstra Australia call 3Gpp service 4G and they call 4G 4Gplus..

Its essentially fraud

<comment><USER39> Displaying the speed in MBps would be much more useful

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm not sure why I'm struggling to find an answer to this question, but does anyone know if the plan for 5G is to have cell phones transmitting at 28 and 39 GHz with the new sample rates? Or are mm wave freqs primarily for infrastructure? I'd love to read about mm transceivers on UE's if anyone has any information about it.

<comment><USER41> Yes, it will happen. [https://www.anandtech.com/show/13106/qualcomm-announces- thei...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13106/qualcomm-announces-their- first-5g-mmwave-antenna-module-qtm052-coming-this-year)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wish we could show real bandwidth, latency and drop rate instead. Even better, have industry agree on minimum values for one bar to four bars of connectivity. And gradually upgrade these requirements over time.

All these names just confuse consumers and distract from solving the actual problems. The radio technology stack is mostly an implementation detail.

<comment><USER33> How would you know real bandwidth and latency without running a test?

How would you run a test often enough to keep the signal information up-to- date, without impacting data usage and/or battery?

It's a great idea, but I think there's a reason we don't do it. RSSI values work well enough.

<comment><USER43> Monitor existing radio traffic? Would work at least for bandwidth and drop rate, maybe not latency. If the user isn't using the radios, fall back on a signal-strength based estimate. For bonus points, learn the estimated connectivity based on correlations between previously measured radio metrics and signal strength in the same location.

Or just hide the bars and show a binary "go/no-go" symbol to indicate if the phone has a current radio connection. Your phone is always connected to GCM or Apple's equivalent so why not use the health of that connection as an indicator?

<comment><USER33> I find that when my iPhone has one bar, web pages often load much more slowly than when I have five bars. So I find the distinction moderately useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I know AT&T phones (or perhaps all American carriers?) display HSPA+ as 4G, but in Europe the same is known as 3.75G.

<comment><USER36> Or "3.5G", but Android without any vendor crap (i.e. LineageOS or any other AOSP based build) doesn't use the "G" above 3G: "H", "H+", "LTE" and "LTE+"

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> 5G is practically useless in a way, due to its frequency and how your hand could block the signals too.

<comment><USER21> Different carriers/countries are deploying 5G on different frequencies. Some are using lower frequencies similar to the ones currently used by 3G/4G

<comment><USER45> That's good to hear, but wouldnt the change in frequency lower the speed of 5g? if it's similar to 3/4G, wouldnt that just make 5G as fast as 4G?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The one thing I wish would happen now is some carrier have the guts to finally roll out their 5G, or 3GPP Rel 15 in full and call it, 6G.

Because their competitor decided to call something 5G which isn't 5G, they have no choice but rename their network as 6G.

I hope that is T-Mobile US.

</comment><comment><USER47> It's about better than 4G but not real 5G, so why not 4½G or something like that...

<comment><USER20> "4.5G" is in fact what it's called by engineers:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_Advanced_Pro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_Advanced_Pro)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> That's not the title of the article, and the premise behind the HN version of the title is at best confused. "5G" is not a specific technology. What you might be thinking of as "5G" is 3GPP's "5G NR" which is a new air interface. But 3GPP will continue to evolve LTE in parallel alongside 5G NR into the "5G" era: [https://www.grandmetric.com/2018/10/29/3gpp- release-16-furth...](https://www.grandmetric.com/2018/10/29/3gpp- release-16-further-lte-and-5g-nr-enhancements). The reason for that is that the really big benefits of 5G NR come at higher frequency bands which will not always be appropriate for cellular service. At lower frequency bands, evolved versions of LTE will continue to be relevant for the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER49> Sure, why not, the company that redefined what "unlimited" means is now going to put false advertising on its junk.

At any point , is the US Government going step up to the plate and actually do it's job?

</comment><comment><USER50> This is the kind of thing users _could_ have control over if they use their own operating system, correct? Are custom ROMs like LineageOS configured to check for this kind of thing?

</comment><comment><USER51> So, may i place a fake AT&T logo on a Huwai phone?

</comment><comment><USER52> If we can define peanut butter, we should be able to define network names. Names mean things after all.

</comment><comment><USER53> AT&T is the worst. Nearly a century of bad behavior over and over again.

</comment><comment><USER54> Sounds like they are learning marketing from IBM.

</comment><comment><USER55> Who charges these people with fraud, and why are they not acting?

</comment><comment><USER56> they should get sued for this but they won't...

</comment><comment><USER57> I thought the author's avatar was the facepalm emoji at first

woulda been fitting

</comment><comment><USER58> Marketers lie.

</comment><comment><USER59> This HN title is pretty clickbaity and doesn't represent the actual title of the article. The word "fake" appears nowhere in the article. "Fake" is subjective in this context.</comment>


Want to learn how Dave McClure grew 500Startups to the most global accelerator? - <AUTHOR> http://www.hustlecon.com/stories/500startups/

<comment><USER2> Thank you for sharing. Love the infographic and 500 is totally badass...Global, diverse, forward thinking. Love the HustleCon concept - "a kick-ass conference focused non-tech startup founders."

Got my link ('cause I'm a hustla baby) [http://prelaunch.hustlecon.com/?ref=37a9a7ecc3](http://prelaunch.hustlecon.com/?ref=37a9a7ecc3)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hustle Con is a badass conference where the best non-technical founders (like Dave McClure) teach how they got started and give practical advice on growing your startup.</comment>


Slide.com becomes MySpace for slideshows - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/04/20/myspace-for-slideshows/ <comment><USER2> This is big, assuming it catches on. Even if it doesn't at least Slide isn't still relying completely on finicky distribution channels like MySpace.

Now where are the public profile pages for the rest of the widgets?

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't get it - just because they allow users to create friends list, they think they will be the next MySpace?? What about users expressing themselves, I think MySpace offers music, photographs, blogs, whatever (they could probably add a slide show feature within a day, if they don't already have one). What if people have more to their identity than slide shows?

Actually I think most people don't think about themselves in terms of slide shows, so no, Slide is nowhere near to MySpace.

</comment><comment><USER4> beat me to it Sam. I think this is huge news. Am I the only one?</comment>


Download Google webfonts on the Linux desktop - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/andrewsomething/typecatcher <comment><AUTHOR> I was unaware Typecatcher was available on GitHub until just recently. I wrote a blog post about it in 2014, wasn't on GitHub then:

[https://longren.io/install-all-google-web-fonts-on-ubuntu- ea...](https://longren.io/install-all-google-web-fonts-on-ubuntu-easily/)

I've always found it very useful and is not widely known about, apparently.</comment>


10,000-Year-Old Stone Tool Site Discovered in Suburban Seattle - <AUTHOR> http://westerndigs.org/10000-year-old-stone-tool-site-discovered-in-suburban-seattle/ <comment><USER2> As far as I know you can't radiocarbon date anything that has been soaked in water.

That would explain the discrepancy between 3,500 and 10,000 years.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious why you can't? I'm guessing that seawater permeation would alter the isotope distribution, but I also wonder if the alteration is predictable in some fashion. Does seawater affect the decay rate in some fashion?

<comment><USER2> Yes, that's exactly it. You can sometimes adjust if the water was constant and you have some other clock you can calibrate to (for example the bottom of the ocean at a specific depth).

But if you have water that came and went then the errors are too large.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> USA is like: "Look, we have ancient history as well!".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan)

National Treasure the movie was a good laugh though.</comment>


Ballmer and Elop: Nokia-Microsoft alliance focused on scale and Office/Bing - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/mobile-wireless/3260587/ballmer-and-elop-nokia--microsoft-alliance-focused-on-scale-and-access-to-office-and-bing/

<comment><USER2> Interesting analyst comment here - baisc thumbs up but Nokia warned not to become a box shifter. HArd to se how they will avoid it.</comment>


Microsoft to Developers: Windows Outsells Android, iOS, OS X Combined - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2012/12/10/microsoft-ad-woos-devs-by-touting-more-windows-licenses-than-android-ios-and-os-x-combined/?fromcat=all <comment><USER2> Well then give us an API which isn't painful to use and give us confidence you won't abandon it after a couple of years. Maybe fully committing to dogfooding their APIs for the first time ever might inspire some faith. That's the real, underlying reason mac products have such a good relationship with developers: apple can't resist those meaty chunks. At least by comparison with MS.

Also, what percentage of those windows license sales represent an environment where installing arbitrary software is even permitted by the computers owner?

I wonder, does microsoft have a vision for an app store in the enterprise? I suppose one of the advantages of the sandboxing is it might lead to a relaxation of the rules around installing other software on corporate machines.

<comment><USER3> I am not much of a Windows guy, but C#, .NET and the accompanying tools seem pretty nice to me and have been supported about as long as Mac OS X. It's also my impression that Microsoft has introduced fewer breaking changes into .NET during that period — though again, that might just be a symptom of me being more tuned into the Apple ecosystem. Was there anything similar to what Apple did to Carbon developers a few years back, abruptly deprecating most of the framework just a few months before an OS release?

And Apple has been accused of having the opposite problem — writing APIs just for the "showcase" applications. Very often the first version of an API will be great for recreating Apple's demos, but when you need to go past that, the framework is either unhelpful or actually gets in your way. (I'd like to offer some good examples, but they're eluding me at the moment. I know I've seen a number of complaints along these lines on the Cocoa-Dev mailing list over the years.)

IMO, the reason for Apple's good relationship with developers look more like this:

• It's UNIX, which developers have always loved for fairly well-known reasons.

• Microsoft entered the last decade pretty much universally despised. Many developers would flat-out refuse to work there, despite it being a hugely successful company with generous compensation, just because association with Microsoft was so very uncool.

• Apple sold boutique computers to consumers and professionals. People who bought Apple computers were signaling "I actively seek out and pay for experiences that I like better." This meant Apple's user base has generally been disproportionately profitable for apps targeted at those markets.

• Related to the second point, Apple was the major alternative at a time when technophiles wanted to get away from Microsoft. They could have gone to Linux, but at the time Macs were just a bit more mature and "safe," particularly on laptops.

<comment><USER4> > C#, .NET and the accompanying tools seem pretty nice to me and have been > supported about as long as Mac OS X.

On the back end server, that's mostly true.

Microsoft has been playing the "here's a new API, we'll stop improving the old one, and make relying on it foolish" treadmill for more than 15 years: MFC, ATL, ODBC, ADO, DAO, Liquid, SilverLight, WPF, WinForms, VB6 -> VB.Net, DNA -> ASP, ...

The world, up until a few years ago, was very happy to be on that treadmill. I was always baffled by it, but I can understand the fashion and buzzword driven resume IT world.

Except, something changed in the last 3 years: People are no longer as happy with the Microsoft treadmill, and the cool kids started liking the stuff that does not strictly depend on a corporate sponsor for advances and obsoleting: Ruby [on Rails], Node.js, Clojure, and more.

I'm working on a project that's heavily invested in WPF, a decision that seemed reasonable to the decision makers back in 2010, and it's a horrible mess. There are resource leaks that have been reported as "won't fix until next version" 3 years ago, but it was only a year ago that it became clear there never will be a next version. (I have to manually call garbage collection once every second or so, or the GUI freezes with no error or explanation. Figuring that out was a few wasted days of debugging).

And WPF obsoleted WinForms; And silverlight was supposed to be a subset of WPF, except they have a weird common subset that is useful for nothing, and a lot of stuff I need was added to SilverLight, but not WPF, with the intention of adding it to the next WPF that never came.

Oh, and SilverLight was abandoned too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a slight issue with Microsoft saying 'look how many licenses we sold!' As there's no direct way to know if they're talking about licenses in the hands of consumers, or licenses sold by the yard to OEMS currently sat in a box.

<comment><USER6> they always have and always will use that metric - it impresses the users. It probably won't impress developers though.

<comment><USER5> Probably not, at least when Apple says "Hey, we sold Xmillion copies of Mountain Lion" you know that they're pretty much talking about how many people have installed it. Same with Android and iOS when they talk about how many activations they've seen, as a developer you instantly get the number of users you're going to potentially have as an audience. Juicing the numbers is not going to woo developers who can see right through it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They don't give stats on corporate installs though, and I would bet that most Windows licences are to corporates. I'd be willing to bet that the majority of users aren't able to purchase their own software.

</comment><comment><USER8> I realise that it may not seem very important in this context, but for being a site aimed towards developers, and after all the HTML5-touting that the IE- team has been doing, I was pretty disappointed to find that the site in question (<http://www.generationapp.com>) uses the XHTML 1.0 Transitional- doctype.

When even <http://www.microsoft.com> uses <!DOCTYPE html>, I fail to see why a developer-focused site (with visitors who actually check the source code) would not.

<comment><USER9> Because in the real world, doctypes don't make any difference?

Don't get me wrong, I do understand where you are coming from- but when there is literally no actual change aside from what the first line of the document source looks like... I have a hard time getting too agitated about it.

<comment><USER10> _Because in the real world, doctypes don't make any difference?_

Really? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode#Comparison_of_docum...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode#Comparison_of_document_types)

<comment><USER9> OK, let me rephrase. "The HTML5 doctype and XHTML Transitional doctypes do not make any meaningful difference".

Luckily, we are long past the days of quirks mode if we just remember to set a decent doctype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The thing I don't get is, isn't the Windows App Store only available to Windows 8? Microsoft definitely haven't sold a billion licenses to Windows 8, so where does that claim come from?

<comment><USER12> This is just a PR gamble with the numbers. They are saying for the past 2 years.

And that probably means that Android outsold Windows this year, or else they wouldn't have used "last 2 years". Going by Android's growth rate and Windows' saturation, i would say this is a good guess.

<comment><USER13> It's even worse. Look at slide 24 in

[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/12/mary- meekers-2012-internet-t...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/12/mary- meekers-2012-internet-trends.html)

for the overall trend. Counting all computing devices - PCs, smartphones, tablets (and that's what matters in the app market) - Windows used to have 95% of that market, but iOS and Android are quickly reducing that and the Windows figure is now 35%.

The last time Windows had such low market share was around 1984. But then Windows was rapidly rising, today it is rapidly declining.

<comment><USER14> That is an amazing slide show!

Stuff I kind of sort of already knew, but numbers and charts really bringing home the magnitude of some of the changes, challenges, and opportunities in front of us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Over the last 2 years, more Windows licenses have been sold than Android, iOS, and Macs combined."

So they're using total sales of all their desktop and mobile OS licenses combined for the past two years as a basis of comparison? And they're including the corporate licenses and OEM bundles?

I wonder how many of these total sales were to individuals who actually had a choice of OS?

The data might be true, but is deeply misleading as far as portraying the actual market trend.

<comment><USER9> _I wonder how many of these total sales were to individuals who actually had a choice of OS?_

I'm not sure it matters, for their purposes. They are people running Windows for developers to target, how they came to do so is largely irrelevant.

<comment><USER16> It could be pretty significant. If a strong majority of Windows users are in corporate environments where they're not permitted to install software, every developer who doesn't produce the sort of software purchased by corporate IT departments will have no access to that user base.

<comment><USER15> Yes, that, and also another factor (although still a relatively small slice of the market) is the people who buy machines with OEM bundled Windows and then just install some form of Linux on it to use instead. Those people aren't going to be consuming any Windows "apps" either, but they would be counted in Microsoft's total.

Basically, it's an empty boast intended to obscure the fact that Windows is losing market share incredibly fast.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how inflated the license count is from the armies of corporate machines where users can't actually install any app that a potential windows developer writes.

<comment><USER18> That's a good point. If you come up with the Next Big Thing it will never get installed on my Windows box at work unless the company wants to use it (which isn't very likely).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well since there are no real numbers cited we have no way of fact checking them.

Slide #24 of this presentation offers a more telling picture of where Wintel is headed: [http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/2012-kpcb- internet-...](http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/2012-kpcb-internet- trends-yearend-update#btnNext)

(Spoiler, it isn't pretty)

</comment><comment><USER20> "The problem is that it clearly wasn't created by developers"

I would shudder to think what an ad developed by developers would look like..

<comment><USER15> I'm guessing that one for Microsoft would include footage of Ballmer screaming "Developers! Developers! Developers!" just for the lulz.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It is a rather brash statement when you look at all those platforms and realise they can all run HTML5 and java. So if I was a devloper and given the processing power now afforded even the average lowest sample in the combined. Well I'd look at the advantage of portability along with removing so much of the platform specifics. So in this situation It would totaly make that the original argument leveriged by Microsoft in this article void.

You could say that most platforms are more powerful than most users actualy needs and use and again end up thinking HTML5/java. Now backend/server wise type applications, now that is another question all together.

<comment><USER22> Or, you could take a look and notice that Javascript is now supported by Visual Studio, write an app for the Windows 8 Store, turn around and use Phone Gap to port it to Android (rather easy) and iOS (somewhat more difficult), and then see which platform actually drives the most sales for you.

Then again, it could just be me being greedy :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Microsoft do make some very valid and to an extent accurate arguments in the advertisement. While the true number of consumer licences will probably never be revealed, you can't argue that it's still probably a very high number once you subtract OEM vendor licence purchases and enterprise licences. I don't doubt a lot of those licences are sitting on the shelves of computer stores, but I also don't doubt that the uptake of Windows 8 is pretty high and given that it has only been one month, those metrics are pretty impressive regardless of the truthfulness behind them which works in Microsoft's favour because people are suckers for numbers.

Windows 8 is Microsoft's best shot at infiltrating the lucrative app store market. Having used the preview version of Windows 8 for sometime, I've grown to like the OS and think the app store model within the operating system has potential. The issue with Microsoft is that they don't stick to their laurels, they build something and support it for a couple of years and then phase it out leaving developers in the cold. Give us easier tools, give us a decent API, provide better support and give us some assurance and then Windows 8 will truly be a success. They're on the right track streamlining the experience between XBOX, mobile device, tablet and desktop at least.

</comment><comment><USER24> And _desktop_ developers have always targeted Windows. What's the big deal?

</comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone comment on how good cross version development is on Windows? If tools are available to minimize the overhead of cross-platform development in this regard, then I don't see why the ad should be viewed in such a negative light.

<comment><USER25> Cross version or cross platform?

I can potentially write a Win32 desktop app that runs on XP, 7 and 8.

Metro apps can be used on 8 and RT, with a potential port to Windows Phone 8.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> OS share slide from Mary Meeker's presentation last week showing that changing rapidly: [http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/50bd70c96bb3f73b0e0...](http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/50bd70c96bb3f73b0e000006-900/.jpg)

<comment><USER27> That slide directly contradicts the article's headline.

<comment><USER26> <http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The fact that Windows 7 has sold well is completely irrelevant for the Microsoft store developers, right now, especially if Windows 8 continues selling very poorly.

Also _right now_ Android is selling faster than Windows has ever sold, and growing. The reason it hasn't sold as many as Windows "in the past 2 years" is because its growth rate was much slower back then, and so it was for iOS. But both iOS and Android EASILY beat Windows 8 in sales right now. It's not even a contest.

<comment><USER29> Except the numbers Microsoft have been throwing about say Windows 8 is outselling Windows 7. The key is if it continues to sell well, chances are it will thanks to OEM deals.

Anecdotally a large percentage of people I know have upgraded, I'm well of aware of this due to discussions about (both negatie and positive) but using it. Mostly negative TBH LOL.

<comment><USER28> Microsoft has only given the numbers of what they sold to OEM's - not to consumers. It's like with chip deals. You can order $1 billion worth of chips. But if you can't sell them all to customers that's your problem. The manufacturers ordered a lot of licenses. But so far, I haven't seen market research companies say they did that well in the market with them. Guess we'll see in the next quarter results, if they even give those numbers, and also whenever Microsoft mentions when they sold new licenses, because I guess that would mean the manufacturers ran out of the first 40 million.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> For now.</comment>


Ask HN: How is your experience with Village Capital program? - <AUTHOR> Before we are part of the cohort, we have to demo our product on Skype this Monday, 30th Oct. This is going to be my second demo, and I need inputs before I decide to invest my time on it. I sucked at my first product demo. <comment><USER2> What is Village Capital? Is this another bootcamp? Seems like quite a few have gone under recently.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an accelerator program for social ventures.</comment></comment>


Is It Ethical for This Atheist to Make a Ton of Money Selling a Bible App? - <AUTHOR> http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2015/02/03/is-it-ethical-for-this-atheist-to-make-a-ton-of-money-selling-a-bible-app/

<comment><AUTHOR> There's a break-down of the sales on the author/atheist/ex-Mormon's blog:

> My 2nd year net revenue increased to $100,134, again after Apple's cut.

[http://www.trevormckendrick.com/My-2nd-Year-in-the-App- Store...](http://www.trevormckendrick.com/My-2nd-Year-in-the-App-Store/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Hey, you might sell running shoes and be a couch potato. Why is this even a question?

</comment><comment><USER3> Yes.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you buy your health care? - <AUTHOR>

I have been working as a programmer for 15 years now.  Currently, I have a good job at a major company.  I have a wife and a kid.  I am thinking about starting my own company but I am not sure about the health care insurance.  I have look at this site http://www.freelancersunion.org, which is very affordable but it doesn't have a plan for Texan.  Please let me know if you know any other good options.<p>Thank you <comment><USER2> I'm a former Freelancers Union member and though the plans are quite good in NY, they're not so hot outside of that area. The fact is they aren't a union and they aren't an insurance provider either. They're a membership organization that negotiates group eligibility and rates. There are other types of groups that do this as well, perhaps one where you live that has better relationships with your state's dominant HMOs.

I have private coverage purchased directly from my local Blue Cross/Blue Shield. I don't recommend this route, it's low-cost, but the coverage is full of loopholes. The advantage of a group like Freelancers Union is that the plans are vetted for "gotchas" and providers don't want to piss off thousands of customers who are semi-organized.

If you do go the retail route, be very careful. I'd liken the experience to buying electronics out of the back of a truck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't let healthcare stop you from starting your own company. You can get COBRA continuation coverage for 18 months.

I'm currently using COBRA continuation coverage; this is the second time I've done so in 10 years, and it's a great way to keep your same health plan while starting up a new venture. With any luck, within 18 months your new company will have the critical mass to get your own small business plan.</comment>


Think Like a 5-Year Old - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/jeff-hoffman/innovative-leadership-power-of-childlike-wonder.html <comment><USER3> It is funny, how "adults" think that this behavior is not acceptable.

I am... very curious. I am all the time curious, I keep researching about everything.

Sometimes I just stop, and keep looking at something, wondering how it works.

One day for example, I remember that I was looking at the rain, seeing it splashing on a roof that I could see from where I was. I kept looking at how the raindrops shattered when hitting the hard surface.

My then-girlfriend approached me, and asked: "what you are looking so much?"

I explained to her my wonderings about the raindrops.

Her reply was: "this is useless, drop it."

The thing is, this was not a single incident, and not only with her, many times in my life, people tried to convince me to be LESS curious.

I wonder why.

I wonder why the sense or wonder, curiosity, wanting to learn, is viewed as childish or a thing to be hated, or as a time wasting activity.

<comment><USER4> "When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

CS Lewis

<comment><USER5> No one is so jealous of their dignity as people trying to grow up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Assumptions are a funny business. Think of them as a kind of cache. We absolutely must cache most of our beliefs about reality. It would quickly overwhelm us to compute every thought response to everyday stimuli.

Many people think of the neocortex as a big computational device. In reality the data structure contributes more to our intelligence. In half a second we can easily recognize a familiar object. In that time, a signal can traverse perhaps 100 neurons. A cpu takes several orders of magnitude more. It is much more likely that we are retrieving most reactions rather than computing them. I highly recommend Jeff Hawkins' book "On Intelligence" if you want to learn more about this fascinating subject.

But many of these cached computations have a timeout that we fail to honor. In fact everything that goes into the cache is information about a reality that no longer exists as it did. We nevertheless get so much utility from the old cache that it can be easy to forget to prune and update it. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Which leads to another interesting thing about assumptions. Your assumptions are always wrong. They probably yield a good amount of utility for you, but on some level they are incomplete at the very least. All of the items you pull out of your cache are improvable.

Another way to look at it is that nearly all of our potential lies in the set of things that we currently reject.

<comment><USER7> A possibly related concept which your comment reminded me of is "the half-life of facts": <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4967344>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Someone once told me that a great way to find industries or competitors ripe for disruption is to play the childlike "Why?" game with them. You know, the one where you start with a broad proposition, then ask "why," and continue narrowing down until you're satisfied with the subsequent answers. When you reach a "Why?" for which there's no good explanation, you might be onto something.

<comment><USER9> Asking the "why" isn't the valuable part; it is answering that question. The effort to break down and understand the problem is what leads to the insights.

<comment><USER8> Yes, but I think you're slightly misunderstanding me. The "asking why" is the breaking-down-the-problem process. I didn't mean _literally_ just asking "Why."

<comment><USER10> 5-whys is a common root-cause algorithm.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I certainly wouldn't like to suggest that drugs are the answer to everything, but they are the answer to _some_ things...

In this case, the author might be interested in smoking a HUGE JOINT and stepping into his office. He might find the same sense of curiosity as the five year-old. Magic mushrooms could also do this, but, like the five year-old for the day, might be a bit "more than you bargained for".

Note: just as it's not a good idea for a five year-old to run a company, it is also not advisable to run a company while stoned/drunk/etc.

<comment><USER12> Being curious and thoughtful is not the same thing as being stoned.

The point is not just the endless asking of questions, but rather not skipping the analysis of things you take for granted (or don't even realize you take for granted).

The point is not to _be_ a 5 year old, the point is to ask questions like a 5 year old and use that to better inform how you act.

<comment><USER11> I beg to differ. Drugs, specifically the hallucinogenic types (and for this case I am also including marijuana in that category) or meditation (for the more enterprising and diligent) are the easiest way to extract yourself from the tunnel vision with which you see the world.

In fact, I think most (say) 50 year old people who are "set in their ways" would find it VERY difficult to see the world with "new eyes" without some very strong outside stimulus, whether it is drugs, meditation, or some traumatic event.

<comment><USER13> _"(and for this case I am also including marijuana in that category)"_

Really?

I've noticed weed makes a lot of people incurious and just sort of drift through things.

<comment><USER14> Indica vs Sativa.

<comment><USER13> Seriously?

I have severe doubts that that makes as much difference as... well anything.

It's like whisky drunk vs. beer drunk, they're different because of the speed you take them in, their concentration absorption speeds and a variety of subjective feelings.

Now I know it's a little more complicated than the ethanol picture, with a variety of active compounds in different quantities, but I am very skeptical that a different strain of the plant can make the change from 'stumbling through life apathetically' to 'deep psychedelic self-realisation'.

Not that I'm convinced deep psychedelic self-realisation is much other than brainfart either.

<comment><USER14> Admittedly I'm not swimming in data. So it could certainly be suggestion or selective reporting or whatever else.

All I was really trying to point out was that there are clearly different 'states' of high: introspective (to the point of paranoia), inquisitive, giggly, zoned, etc.

Just as there are different states of drunk: 'tipsy', 'hyper-active', 'depressed', 'blotto', etc.

So just as not everyone who hits a beer bong is going to streak across the quad to the gymnasium, not everyone who gets high is going to necessarily question the universe nor necessarily sit on the couch and watch the world pass by.

You can't gauge marijuana from the actions of a handful of stoners any more than you can gauge alcohol from the actions of a handful of stumbling drunks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I saw the article headline, my first thought was the five-year-old trait most likely to find in most leaders ... I want, I want, mine, mine, mine.

And to be fair leadership is not about rediscovering child-like curiosity - <USER2> is about applying objective thinking rigorously and without ego - try looking at Poor Charlies' Almanck

<comment><USER16> > I want, I want, mine, mine, mine.

I was picturing suddenly turning to one of my colleagues, giving him a good push, grabbing his computer and saying "MINE!".

<comment><USER17> I thought of the seagulls from _Finding Nemo_...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm reminded of the old story about the guy who always cut the ends off the ham before putting it into the roasting pan. His wife asked him why, but he just said his mom always did it. She, in turn, said that her mom always did it. Finally, the wife got hold of her husband's grandmother and found out that she cut the ends off the ham because she only had a small roasting pan.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm pretty certain this article is a ripoff of Ricardo Semler's "3 Whys" technique he described in his book from 1995 ([http://www.amazon.com/Maverick- Success-Behind-Unusual-Workpl...](http://www.amazon.com/Maverick-Success- Behind-Unusual-Workplace/dp/0446670553)). Not that this is a bad thing, but there are many more, better articles describing this using more clinical language and providing guidance for real management application.

Here are a couple of top Google results: [http://www.managementexchange.com/blog/forget-empowerment- ai...](http://www.managementexchange.com/blog/forget-empowerment-aim- exhilaration)

<http://www.ict.swin.edu.au/personal/ebihari/>

and even a version of The Art of War: <http://www.worldmarkacademy.com/moodle/file.php/1/3.pdf>

</comment><comment><USER20> One thing I've noticed: people who present themselves as old and wise aren't. The _truly_ old and wise haven't forgotten what it's like to be young and naive.

</comment><comment><USER21> >> Exasperated, I silenced her questions with a bag of Cheetos.

Is anybody still surprised that more than 66% of this country is overweight/obese?

<comment><USER17> Now that he appreciates her questioning, that may be one less fat kid.

I've noticed that here in Murka, increasingly, people can't be arsed to engage with their kids. Kids are expensive, gaudy accessories, as anyone with (particularly female) Facebook friends who go through that "LOOK AT MAH NEW BABBY" picture posting stage can see; but actually engaging with them and treating them like humans is... well, it's too much work and hassle.

So they shut them up with Cheetos or cookies or sketti or go-go juice and get on with what's really important, whatever that may be.

<comment><USER22> The keyword in the first paragraph is "niece".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why do some articles make the front page of HN, and other ones don't? Or the front page of Google News? How was it that Vine was getting so much attention for a few days, and then the buzz just...died? Did someone orchestrate that?

<comment><USER24> Do not contemplate the whims of the Hackertariat. A curious pinpoint of darkness soon grows closer, eventually enveloping you in its yawning black, chilling the marrow and ensnaring the wits. Artifacts and whispers float by but become dust in your grasp, slipping out and past your knuckles, carried away by the soft, silent wind.

It was ever thus and shall never not be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> TL;DR: don't be like the old farts from Xerox that discarded PARC's Alto and the mouse as a novelty.

</comment><comment><USER26> There is an excellent book on the subject. It's really worth reading: [http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Sandbox-Childhood- Rediscover-B...](http://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Sandbox-Childhood-Rediscover- Business/dp/0809224380)

</comment><comment><USER27> >" _When we got to the office, my niece did what all kids her age do. She questioned everything._ "

Never really had this with our son, will wait and see if it comes with second child - when we're out I'm in a semi-continuous state of explaining as much as I know about interesting things around us and asking questions - "well what do you think?".

I do wonder sometimes if my modus is destructive to curiosity but generally he's pretty questioning in terms of things.

</comment><comment><USER28> Sounds similar to the Zen Buddhist concept of Shoshin or beginner's mind.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshin>

</comment><comment><USER29> i still act like i'm 5 all the time...i just bang on things until they work and then try and figure out what i banged on

</comment><comment><USER30> Use Stock Photo of a 2-Year Old</comment>


Performance Parking - <AUTHOR> http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/computing/2014/summer/performance-parking.shtml <comment><USER2> So, this is nothing new. People in the parking industry have been grappling with this problem for years (I'm in that industry). Parking technology has just rocketed ahead from where it was even 5 years ago. From license plate recognition (LPR - allows parking without having a physical permit) to being able to forecast and adjust prices based on historical demand, parking people have a vast wealth of knowledge on their hands.

The only problem is, most vendors of parking management software have enterprise products spanning millions of lines of code that have to be maintained, and it's hard to keep adding new features like "performance parking" while keeping basic features like selling permits and interfacing with accounting and bursar systems up-to-date.

It's definitely a challenging (yet exciting!) time to be in the parking technology industry.

Edit: Ooh, I'm forgetting about smart meters, mobile apps (both for the parker and the parking operation), and more. Mobile apps are the rage now for parking operations, as they replace expensive ($5000+) industrial handhelds for parking enforcement agents.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm interesting ... if I may ask a couple of more questions .. What devices did you previously use ? and I suppose these were manufactured by a company specialized in the parking industry ?

And What are the new Apps that have replaced the heavy handheld of the previous generation ?

<comment><USER2> No, the devices were general purpose handheld devices running Windows Mobile 6. The apps are private and only distributed to customers. They are not available in app stores.

[0][http://www.casio-intl.com/asia-mea/en/pa/IT-9000/](http://www.casio- intl.com/asia-mea/en/pa/IT-9000/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm .. interesting ; thanks for you reply :) So, if the city bought these in mass , who programmed them for you ? I suppose these were then given to third party companies to program

1.Like Enter the header for the printed out tickets

2.Relay back information about total number of tickets issued etc., etc., ? Did all of the information on these devices automatically roll over to centralized servers ? Or did you have to manually plug it into a computer and sync data ? Did the third party companies ever write such software for you ? or were they predominantly standalone terminals involved paperwork later on ? for example : you have to input the parking ticket number again in a computer later on ?

<comment><USER2> We do the programming :)

Most devices like this have an online and an offline mode, using cellular or WiFi connections. The process is usually, the officer writes the ticket, if it's in online mode, it transmits that to a web service, which then enters it in a database. If it's offline, it just stores it until it goes online.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seattle actually has a similar sign-based system in place. I rarely have trouble finding a spot, but I moved here recently so unsure how it compares to previous system. [http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/parking/signs_icons.ht...](http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/parking/signs_icons.htm)

</comment><comment><USER4> Why not make an auction? That would be fun. Vote with smartphone and/or terminal on the street.

<comment><USER5> If your definition of "fun" is arriving at a parking lot not knowing if there will be a spot or how much you will be paying then yes, sure - mountains of fun.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that the normal state of affairs already? Or rather, usually you know that there won't be a spot unless you go hunting for half an hour or so.

The idea would of course be to book the spot in advance, so you WOULD know that there is a parking lot waiting for you.

<comment><USER6> coincidentally

>Isn't that the normal state of air fares already

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Aww I thought it was going to be videos of people doing amazing parking stunts

<comment><USER8> Here's some for you (it's an old ad so thinks it's ok here) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RHXg5s7wv8](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RHXg5s7wv8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you guys check the file ([http://www.lq.com/lq/data/hotelMarkers.js](http://www.lq.com/lq/data/hotelMarkers.js)) its not actually valid json but rather Javascript, so it was probably just easier for him that way.

<comment><USER10> wrong thread</comment></comment>